In “Liar’s Poker,” Michael Lewis (Princeton class of 1982) described the on-campus recruiting frenzy during which undergraduates fought tooth and nail for jobs at the most prestigious Wall Street firms. The Princeton career office of the early 1980s, he wrote, “resembled a ticket booth at a Michael Jackson concert, with lines of motley students staging all-night vigils to get ahead.”

Oh, how times change. As DealBook reported last week, several Ivy League schools have seen their on-campus recruiting programs come under fire this fall, because of the influence of the Occupy movement and rising antipathy for the financial sector.

Related Links

And this week, student protesters affiliated with the Occupy Princeton movement interrupted not one but two big-bank recruiting sessions at the school, typically among the biggest feeder schools for Wall Street firms.

According to the Daily Princetonian, Princeton students targeted a JPMorgan Chase session and a Goldman Sachs session this week. They “filed into the information sessions under the pretense of prospective applicants and interested students, dressed in business attire, providing their names and emails on sign-in sheets, picking up pamphlets and chatting with recruiters who approached them.”

At the JPMorgan Chase session, held on Wednesday, students used the Occupy movement’s trademark “mic check” call-and-response style to lambaste the bank. “Your predatory lending practices helped crash our economy, we’ve bailed out your executives’ bonuses, you’ve evicted struggling homeowners while taking their tax money,” the protesters said, speaking in front of an audience of interested students and bank recruiters. “In light of these actions, we protest the campus culture that whitewashes the crooked dealings of Wall Street as a prestigious career path.”

At a Goldman Sachs information session the following night, protesters repeated their grievances, and added a message to their fellow students:

Dear Fellow Princeton Students, we are here to ask you for a moment of reflection. Deciding on a future career path is difficult. It deserves serious introspection. When you came to Princeton as a wide-eyed freshman, you probably didn’t dream of working at Goldman Sachs. What happened? We are all privileged to have made it to Princeton. However, our talents will be wasted if we send all our best and brightest to Wall Street.